What is this blog about? It is about technology and history.
Jacob Phillips was my great grandfather who arrived in San Francisco in 1851 in response to the gold rush. He was 21 and had walked across the Panama like nearly everyone else. He looked around and saw that San Francisco was a peninsula town on sand and very small. The East Bay was covered with oak trees and would be difficult to farm. So he looked to the North and found a wonderful farming area surrounding a village called Petaluma that was on a river. He probably figured that the farming area would be supplying the Bay Area and all of the Sierra where the gold rush was.
Based on his European experience, the Petaluma River would support extensive barge traffic pulled by horses as was common in the Europe he came from.
So he settled in Petaluma, the city he expected to be the main focus of commerce for the gold rush and Northern California.
Within a few years, the steamboats that were already plying the Mississippi came to the Bay Area and took food and commerce up and down the Sacramento River to the gold country. Steamboats became the supply line that made San Francisco the center of commerce. Sailboats offloaded their goods, San Francisco created the market and finance and the steamboats took the products up the river to the miners.
Because of the new and unknown technology of steamboats, Jacob and my paternal family settled in the wrong place for me to inherit wealth from that side of the family.
Jacob did well enough, being a taylor and opening a haberdashery. He got a wife from his family city in Holland and had a prosperous life.